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Yes you can, and if you look further here or anywhere else around my website you will see I am not saying that to sell anything. Firstly let me make it clear that I am a practitioner, I work with people in a clinical setting where they come for an initial appointment (which takes about an hour) and then usually come in again one or two weeks later to assess how things are going and also to develop the picture, the individual understanding of their case still further. People are complex, it doesn’t matter that I have treated IBS hundreds of times when I meet someone new I assume I know nothing about them and start with a clean slate. You can see from the below writings on IBS that this is a problem with many possible solutions. Anyone in their right mind should feel downright daunted at the prospect of having to do so much to get well. And I am keenly aware of the disadvantage of just listing all of these therapeutic options instead of doing what I do in practice, guiding the patient along the way of those things that make most sense to start with. I would never suggest to one of my patients to do all the therapeutic options at one time, they couldn’t, but even if they could it would be hopelessly complicated and unsustainable. ~ So where do you start? This takes thought. If you do not have a truly holistic practitioner (meaning someone who is willing to look at the whole picture and has no bias to any particular method over another), and you cannot find such a person to support and guide you then you are on your own in a lot of ways. If you have to work through IBS yourself then you will need the qualities of being very patient and very systematic. Everything good takes time and things can get better and worse no matter what you do so you have to be very careful about deciding what helps and what doesn’t. IBS is rarely caused by one simple factor and most people with IBS have several things going on at the same time. You have to be prepared to systematically work through those things that may help, discarding those that don’t help after they have been given a fair trial (I will write my suggestions as to what kind of time that 'trial' might take) but equally you have to hold on to those things that make a positive difference, even if that improvement is later met with a setback. I am focusing on treatments that someone with a resourceful mindset could find or do themselves. Ido also want to mention that I have often found the combination of herbs Golden Seal, Ginger and Wild Yam to be extremely helpful for some people with IBS and also to warmly encourage you to try to find a good herbalist to help you in this most complex and difficult of health problems.
We make up and use a lot of this in our clinic. I guess the name says it all. This is an old European combination used since antiquity to improve digestion and relieve symptoms of bloating and discomfort. IB tea deserves its place on the top of my list of therapeutic strategies becase I have seen it work on so many levels to help people with IBS. The IB tea is simply a combination of :
The proportions of it are to what as known as ‘equal parts’. That means you use the same weight of each herb when you are making up a batch of it. They mix together very easily. You should be able to get these three herbs wherever you are in the world. Get the best and freshest quality you can; it really does make a difference with herbs. If in doubt, follow your nose, the herbs should smell fresh and strong, not musty or stale. The method to make the tea is very simple. Take 2-3 heaped tsps of the combined herbs and place them in a tea pot, or a saucepan, or a cup, anything that you can then cover and leave for a good 10 minutes. You must make the tea fresh each time and you need to take this as a course of treatment at least two times and preferably three times a day for 2 weeks before you decide how much it is helping you. Ideally the first cup directly after breakfast, the second after lunch, and the third time anytime you like during the evening. The aromatic oils, the essential oils in the herbs degrade quickly after they have been drawn out into the water. That is why you have to cover the tea and also why you have to sip it while it is hot and why you have to make it fresh each time. It is those oils that very quickly, in minutes, penetrate into your blood stream and serve to relieve both inflammation and muscle spasm in the gut. Strain the tea through a tea strainer or some fine cloth like muslin and think about adding a tsp. of honey (I recommend you do, but it is up to you). Remember to sip the tea whilst it is nice and hot. This will definitely relax your digestive system, a lot, but don’t expect a miracle in a matter of days; be patient with it and remember you took a long time to develop this problem. Virtually everyone who has IBS goes through cycles of getting worse and better no matter what they do. It is very tempting, if you go into a worsening cycle, to abandon the new treatment you have been trying or even to blame it for now making you worse! Be careful not to make this mistake. If this tea or any other treatment shows some benefit but you then get worse again just quietly observe if the worsening is as bad or as long lasting as usual. It may very well be that keeping the treatment going will see better and better results over time. That is exactly what happens for most people who stick at it.
Digestive enzymes should also be easy to obtain and try as a treatment. Depending on the strength of the capsules and the size of you, you should take either two or three digestive enzyme capsules with each meal (at the higher end of the products recommended dose range in any case) Many people with IBS do not digest food well. Poorly digested food that is not well absorbed in the small intestine can wreak havoc via excess fermentation (causing bloating and gas) when it gets to the bowel, the large intestine. A low level of digestive enzymes may be an important part of the IBS picture but the only way to find out is to take a course of enzymes and try and see. You should give at least 2 or even 3 weeks of using this strategy before you make up your mind about it. You may have some relapses, some bad patches, in that time and so think they are no good, or even making you worse. Again, resist the temptation to be impatient with what you are doing to help. It it very unlikely digestive enzymes will make you worse; you are already making them every time you eat yourself. With this therapy you are putting something into your body that is already there and are just adding fuel to the fire of digestion, so to speak.
For many people with IBS one of the best things you can do is to increase fibre. Diet, i.e. fruit and vegetables are how we generally get our fibre but if you are going to do this as a treatment then you should think about going directly to the king of fibres: psyllium husks. But, what you have to know, if you don’t already, is that for some people with IBS about the worse thing you can do is to take in more fibre… The label of IBS has these kinds of limitations; really it is a syndrome that contains about 12 different kinds of conditions in it. You have to be careful, and thoughtful about what you do to help. This is by no means categorical, but a good start to knowing whether fibre is likely to heal or harm is to see what side of the scale of disturbed bowel function you tend to swing towards. I can put it this way. The more you tend to constipation the more likely fibre is to help you. The more you tend to diarrhoea the more likely it might make things worse, emphsis on the word might, the only way to know for sure is to try and see. Psyllium husks are what make ‘metamucil’ and many other commercial fibre products work, so you may have already tried this kind of therapy. If you thought that it did in fact help you but it wasn't a cure or you got worse again after a while then do not give up on re-committing to it. Just leave out all the chemical junk and sugars that make up nearly half of the commercial fibre supplements go for the real thing, the pysllium husks. Try to get the psllium husks. The alternative, ground pysllium has a finer sandy texture and is easier to mix and drink but is not as good as the whole pysllium husks which give a coarser substance for the muscles of the bowel wall to work on. For many of my patients with IBS I take this approach even further and use a combination of Psyllium with three other powders that have further benefits on other kinds of disturbed gut health. You can read about that here famous four powders
You may have already tried peppermint oil for IBS or have at least heard of it. I certainly rate it as worth trying. I have not seen remarkable benefits from the peppermint oil alone but I think it can help in conjunction with other strategies and it may well be a combination of several approaches that gets you to a point where you feel you are really starting to get somewhere with IBS. To work, the peppermint oil has to be coated in a special tablet that lets it get into your gut without being broken down in your stomach first. This is called an ‘enteric coated’ capsule. They look thicker than usual capsules but are still easy to swallow. The peppermint gets down into the gut and releases essential oils that help the cramping and muscle tension in the bowel to release. You should take the capsules on an empty stomach to get the best effects. Mintec and Colpermin are two brands that I have frequently prescribed; they are both equally effective and will be available in many countries under those same brand names. You should give the peppermint oil at least one week before you make any decisions about how useful it is. Things may get better and worse over that time but if you are better off overall then keep taking them further. It is the overall movement of your condition that you have to be mindful of, not just the day to day.
There are not that many drug options for IBS, those that there are upet a lot of people out because they are more directed at the brain than the gut. Some physicians treat IBS with powerful drugs that block nerve impulses such as amytriptyline and hyoscyamine. These have been seen to reduce symptoms by reducing the way nerve fibres in the gut communicate pain and discomfort to the brain. Drug therapies for IBS can also include things like loperimide to reduce diarrhoea though this is rarely used a long term strategy. Perhaps most commonly the use of antidepressants such as prozac and citilopram are widely recommended by physicians to people with IBS. Many people describe feeling insulted and misunderstood with this approach. They construe that they are being told this is a problem that comes from their minds and the insinuation if that they are depressed and unable to cope. Many men and women find this profoundly disheartening and leave the medical rooms with a prescription that they never intend to fill and only a deeper sense of despair that they will ever be ‘normal’ again. I can’t say that I get to hear about that many successes with IBS and drugs but I also recognise that my field of exposure is heavily slanted to those people for whom conventional medical approaches do not work. What I want to say about drug therapies may surprise people that have already made up their minds that drugs in general are bad and in particular they are no good for IBS. And that is that you really do need to ‘walk a mile in someone shoes’ before you can say what is right or wrong for them. If a drug helps someone with IBS then I would not take the position that that is a wrong approach because it involved a drug, far from it! It is where the drug therapy does harm that we have to look carefully and consider alternative approaches. I have had many patients come in over the years who are deeply upset about their need to be taking certain drugs and who are looking to me to tell them to get off them because I have an alternative answer. My approach is never to take people off drugs that are actually working. What we need to do is to go deeper into what is causing there to be health problems in the first place, work down at the level where the general health starts to change and heal, and then look at what can be done to get drug free. Firstly get healthy, then get off the drugs. Not get off the drugs and then try and get healthy. One way leads to good outcomes, the other to potential or real harm.
~ Dysbiosis treatment Dysbiosis means an overgrowth of bad bugs in the gut. Many people with IBS have found this to be a significant part of their problem and there are practitioners out there treating along these lines alone. Some of you will have tried dysbiosis treatments and gotten nowhere. In this case think hard before you try it all again just because it is packaged a little bit differently. Some people have tried of things for dysbiosis and felt it sometimes helped and sometimes didn’t. This is common where the dysbiosis is a contributing factor to IBS but by no means all of it. Dysbiosis programs generally have two distinct components; ‘weeding and seeding'. The analogy to a lawn is often given and it is a remarkable fact that if you were to spread out all the tiny folds and wrinkles that line the gut you would get a surface area that would cover two tennis courts! The ‘weeding’ stage has numerous options. There are a lot of products on the natural health market, some of them will be great, some will be useless and you can’t tell by how pretty the packaging is or by make-believe testimonials! Personally, I like raw, fresh garlic just about better than anything for ' weeding' Garlic gets rid of just about everything. Yes it has the drawback of making you smell astounding, but there are ways around that too. One is simply to take it at night, and most (though not all) of the smell will be gone by morning. Another is to mix it with tomatoes, avocadoes, salads etc. Or simply chop it up and swallow it with water if your stomach can take it. Eating some yoghurt or parsley afterwards may help ease the intensity. To work for dysbiosis Garlic has to be raw and you have to have enough of it. For a typical adult that might be up around 3 good sized cloves a day. Now if you are someone who has IBS and you have a very sensitive stomach that you know reacts badly to spicy things, including raw garlic, then do not be foolhardy and ignore what you know because some herbalist you’ve never met said it would help! I am careful about who I recommend raw garlic to in person, the advantage of it is that it is cheap and powerful, the disadvantage is that it can be too powerful. Likewise if you react to yoghurt, or tomatoes, or anything else the consistently make you worse then listen to your body before you listen to anyone else. My second option is the herb wormwood, also justifably famous at ridding the body of parasites, but again to use the dose that is effective you have to be certain the person is robust enough to handle it. I would find a good herbalist to go further with Wormwood treatments. I have found that few people know how long they are supposed to do the weeding stage, many seem to think they are meant to do it indefinitely! That is a sure fire way to end up doing yourself more harm than good. Take a week, at most, to see how your body responds to this phase.
The seeding stage should be simple enough. Put some good bacteria into your body and away they go… Even your supermarket and local chemist have these products on sale but sadly this is another example of caveat emptor, buyer beware. Many of the ‘probiotics’ for sale are inert, useless. Anyone that knows how readily bacteria out in the open both live and die should be suspicious of how active these bottled bugs have remained throughout manufacturing, shipping, standing in storage etc. Remember, I am not bagging the opposition in order to sell something of my own here. This is just how things are. If you have a choice, ask for the probiotic that has the most stringent rules about refrigeration and is made by a company that is known to be over the top for fanatical quality control. You should also definitely 'prove your probiotic', the practical and simple method to do that is written up here in my more detailed article on dysbiosis. Lastly do not underestimate the value of fermented foods, including yoghurt, at helping the good bacteria thrive in your gut. Humans have done well on such foods for many thousands of years.
~ Does anyone with IBS not think about what they have eaten when they feel bad? Everyone who gets an upset digestion thinks about what they have been eating lately. This is ‘hard-wired’ into our brains. You could even call it an instinctive survival mechanism. If the human being (no different to any other animal in this regard) could not associate the link between eating something injurious and getting sick afterwards we could not have evolved in a world where some things are food but some things are poison. It doesn’t matter how many times you work out that you did nothing different with your diet when you have a bad patch, people will still automatically think about and suspect what they ate when their gut gets upset again. The reason this point is so important to understand is that you have to get a firm grip on the fact that, if you have IBS, you are going to be intensely interested in, and probably worried about, what you eat. Sometimes this is a necessary level of attention; it takes you into a place where you can work out which foods really are consistently giving you problems. However this mental ‘hyper-vigilance’ about food is also powerfully double-edged. If you have a bad patch of IBS over a few days and make a strong association to what you have been eating as the cause of it then two things can quickly happen
I am starting the discussion about diet therapy for IBS with this point because this is the area where the most harm gets done in terms of treatments. I have met many people with IBS who are on incredibly restrictive diets but in the long run have only gotten deeper into a worse level of IBS than where they were before they started. Partly I think this is because as the list of forbidden foods gets longer the chances of nutritional deficiencies gets higher and partly because of the tension that gets created when you worry a lot about what you eat. There are many extreme diet plans out there for IBS. Extremely low fat, bland and monotonous diets were the thing when I came in to practice in the late 1980s. Most notably in recent years are diets that remove all starchy polysaccharides (these are basically carbohydrates with complex sugar particles that can become excessively fermented in the gut). If you have already looked into these diets you will understand that I am not overstating it to say they are phenomenally restrictive on what is permitted to be eaten. If they simply didn’t work it would not be a problem, people would hardly use and recommend them if they didn’t help. The problem is that they do work, at least temporarily, and so have become increasingly popular, but at what cost? If you remove all the food substances that can be fermented by bowel bacteria you will certainly get far less or even no bloating as those foods move through your gut. And that is what happens, if people are sufficiently strict enough they effectively ‘fast’ their guts. There is nothing there to ferment. What generally then happens is that people improve significantly at first but unless they rigidly adhere to the diet the rapidly get set-backs, which of course achieves a powerful reinforcement of the need to be super strict on the diet. I have come away saddened from many a meeting with thin, emaciated people on such diets who have incredible levels of tension throughout their digestive and nervous systems. They are so strict with themselves and yet no matter how vigilant they are they still get relapses and the only thing they know that has helped is to tighten their diets even further so they end up on a bare handful of foods. You can end up very afraid of food with IBS. This is one of the legacies of IBS and why it is such a hard problem to work through. ~ So, what diet do I think works best for IBS? The answer to this is three-fold
I have been leading up to this section for a while. In my experience, the deeper into looking for a solution people with IBS go, the more they come back to seeing nervous tension as a key driver. People talk about this in different ways but there is constancy in their understanding and, especially if they have had their problem for a while, I have learned to listen very closely to what it is that people feel is most making them sick. Talking about nervous tension is a tricky area to communicate effectively about. Herbal teas, digestive enzymes, fibre, diets, these are all straightforward to grasp why they might help and how they can be tried. When get into the area of nervous tension and the mind/body we quickly come up against this maddeningly difficult question ~ Is IBS physical or psychological? Many people who have IBS have been told, often by their doctors or specialists, that their problem is psychological in origin. They are often recommended drugs that work on the mind and nervous system to underline this belief. And many people, who are suffering intense and daily physical discomfort totally irrespective of how well, or poorly, their life is going at any one time find this point of view to be patronising and hurtful. Telling someone who is in pain that, effectively, this is all in your mind is a fairly quick and sure fire way to alienate them and crash their confidence. Nevertheless IBS is more than just a physical condition, and yes it certainly does involve the mind as well… where to from here? I am going to go out on a limb in the hope that it will get a very important concept across to as many people who read this as possible… We live in a culture that, a very long time ago, decided humans were different from every other form of life on earth because we had thought (as can be expressed in language, music, art, writing etc amongst other methods). This point of difference was so exalted that we eventually developed an entirely unique self reference as ‘beings who inhabit bodies’. People use a wide variety of language and thought to describe this. We naturally talk about ‘my body’ and everyone understands that the ‘my’ part is me, my personality, my inner self, my mind etc. There seems to be a clear separation of mind, and body, spirit, and flesh. Everyone understands this to the point that we never even really think about it. Then something like IBS comes along and, if you will let it, forces you to think about it further. When you feel pain in your belly, who is feeling it? Of course you are registering the pain in your brain but ‘you’ are actually feeling it in your belly. So where are you? I and a very long line of herbalists who came before me, do not understand the body to be separate from the mind at all. It is cumbersome phrase, but I am writing here, and often speak with my patients about the ‘mind/body’. Meaning you can’t have one without the other. The mind/body are not two things that are somehow entwined together, they are one thing that was never separated in the first place! For some people this may be reading as a bit far out, but if you can’t easily grasp this concept then I suggest that you look further, not less, into it. So long as you are trying to battle for IBS being a physical, or a psychological disorder you are going to lose whichever side you are on, because it is neither. It is both. As soon as you get how it makes absolutely no practical difference whether you believe that tension comes from your mind or your body, because it is there regardless of where you think it started, then you have an excellent chance of getting a handle on it. Is it a coincidence that IBS usually begins in the late teens or early 20s? Why, what is really going on there with that well recognised fact about IBS? We are beginning to meet the world arent we? And it is not easy. I don’t know and I don’t think it matters. Tension is a big part of IBS, whether it was the chicken or the egg really makes no difference. The point is not about where to lay the blame, it is how to get well and to put your problems behind you. More importantly, what is the antidote to tension? It is relaxation. Relaxation is another deep subject, and a tricky one! I cannot do any of that online or on paper. But I can tell you the single most important question I ask people who are suffering from a health problem that has tension at the root, the heart, or the end result of said problem. It is “What do you do to relax, what do you know relaxes you?” There is always something. For many people it is very simple things like reading a book, going for a walk, having a bath, just being in nature and so on. When I then ask the person who is suffering from a tension related health problem how much time for relaxation they have been having, the answer is almost always virtually none! When people are tense they do not think about relaxing. I have seen that people need to make a very conscious and very constant choice to go into and stay in a more relaxed state instead of being in a state of automatic tension. The method of relaxation, the ‘how to’, is actually not anywhere near as difficult as making that choice to become a more relaxed person. Relaxation is one of the most instinctive, natural and easy things in the world to do on the other hand getting tense and staying tense takes a lot of work! If we were not able to profoundly relax ourselves there is simpy no way any of us would ever get to sleep! And then you will. |
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